My take on DotNetNuke 4.3.6

If you're a developer, you at least know of DotNetNuke. It's an open source, completely free web application designed to get feature-rich web sites up and running without all of the associated hassle.

Here at Wiliam I have been working on a proof-of-concept for a client to be installed in DotNetNuke. The new site was designed, cut up into images, HTML and CSS, and given to me to convert into a DotNetNuke skin (template). Having previously only played with the administrative interface of DotNetNuke, I was faced with the task of installing it on my dev machine and setting up the new portal. Here are some of my findings:

• The installation of the DotNetNuke starter kit wasn't very smooth. When you install DotNetNuke it adds a new web site project into Visual Studio 2005. You create it as you would a web site (File->New->Web Site...) and select the new project type. However when I ran it for the first time as instructed, I received a "The page isn't redirecting properly" error in FireFox (IE just sat there doing nothing). It turns out DotNetNuke doesn't like the non-standard port numbers assigned by the built in Visual Studio web server (Cassini). I fixed this by adding the following line in the application's web.config:

<add key="UsePortNumber" value="True"/>

It was a bit of a pain hunting around looking for a fix for this.

• Permissions! Watch out for your permissions. If you start getting a bunch of "database is read-only" errors, give the NETWORK SERVICE account write and modify permissions on your database folder (if using SQL Express).

So far it's been a bit of a painful experience - it's been 8 hours and I've just managed to get the original web template going in DotNetNuke. There's still lots of tweaking plus I've got multiple skins for the one site, which should be interesting. I'm currently not sold on DotNetNuke just yet, but I am a tough crowd. I will post updates as I keep working on it.